EVeryone here should read this article closely. What it descrribes is essentially a deliberate effort on the part of the Bush administration to willfully mislead the American people about WMDs in Iraq:

Piecing Together the Story of the Weapons That Weren't There

By CHARLES J. HANLEY
AP Special Correspondent

Beneath the giant dome of a Baghdad palace, facing his team of scientists and engineers, George Tenet sounded more like a football coach than a spymaster, a coach who didn't know the game was over.

"Are we 85 percent done?" the CIA boss demanded. The arms hunters knew what he wanted to hear. "No!" they shouted back. "Let me hear it again!" They shouted again.

The weapons are out there, Tenet insisted. Go find them.

Veteran inspector Rod Barton couldn't believe his ears. "It was nonsense," the Australian biologist said of that February evening last year, when the then-chief of U.S. intelligence secretly flew to Baghdad and dropped in on the lakeside Perfume Palace, chandelier-hung home of the Iraq Survey Group.

"It wasn't that we didn't know the major answers," recalled Barton, whose account matched that of another key participant. "Are there WMD in the country? We knew the answers."

In fact, David Kay, quitting as chief of the U.S. hunt for WMD, or weapons of mass destruction, had just delivered the answer to the world. The inspectors were 85 percent finished, Kay said, concluding: "The weapons do not exist."

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Key Quotes:

But an interrogation transcript shows he told them something else as well, something they questioned and kept to themselves: All Iraqi WMD were destroyed in 1991.

The inspectors withdrew in late 1998, in a dispute over access to sites. By then, International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) teams could report that Iraq's nuclear program, which never built a bomb, had been dismantled. As for chemical and biological weapons, only scattered questions remained about possible hidden stockpiles.

In fact, as President George W. Bush took office 25 months later, the CIA was reporting, "We do not have any direct evidence" Baghdad was rebuilding its WMD programs.

Evidence now shows Iraq in 2001 had little interest in nuclear "reconstitution." In one captured document [PDF page 148] from that May, Iraqi diplomats in Kenya reported to Baghdad that a Ugandan businessman had offered uranium for sale, but they turned him away, saying U.N. sanctions forbade it.

Mr Brosz here, who seems to enjoy timelines, should read this account closely. What it clearly documents is that every assertion the Bush administation made about WMDs in Iraq was known by the Bush administation to be false well before the start of the Iraq war. This isn't just a case of the administration being wrong, its clear that Bush and company deliberately misled the American people in making a case for war.

While one million American citizens are now attempting to reconstruct their lives in the wake of the Bush administration's failed preparation and response to Katrina, we mustn't forget his failure to be honest with the American people about his reasons for starting a war in Iraq.